Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Fire, beer, motorcycles and hookers...the way to have a successful Memorial Day BBQ!

I told Rinaldo that this was the year he could have the big Memorial Day BBQ. I invited my friends, he invited his, we invited ours plus a few family members thrown in for good measure. We had over 30 people who showed up on Sunday. The day started out a bit crazy with Rinaldo and I running around trying to finish the house cleaning. We got a call around 1:50 from the first guests. They were at the Metro North station, so Rinaldo went to get them. I went out to the deck to keep an eye on the grill which he had just fired up. I was sitting there peacefully working on Swallowtail. Then I noticed there was a lot of smoke blowing up to the deck. Which was odd since we use the grill all the time and that's never been a problem. So I looked closer and saw there was fire under the grill, hmm that's not supposed to happen. It seems that he had left the bag of charcoal underneath and it had caught fire...great. I pulled it out and tried to stamp it out with my foot but that didn't work. It occurred to me at this point that we use Matchlight so those briquets could completely catch at any moment. So I grabbed the fire extinguisher, which Rinaldo had the foresight to bring out earlier and put it out. About five minutes later the first guest arrived but we were off to a blazing start (pardon the pun I couldn't resist).